Category Archives: Stephanie Kelton

Another year has come to pass, and we at NEP would like to offer our sincere appreciation to all of you, our readers. NEP was launched in the summer of 2009 when Stephanie Kelton, Randy Wray and Bill Black teamed up to offer commentary and policy advice about the most dreadful economic meltdown of our time. Many of you have been with us from the beginning – engaging us in the comments section, challenging us to do more, and spreading our ideas beyond NEP – and some of you have even joined us as contributors. A lot has happened since 2009, and we could not have achieved all that we have without your support. So thank you!

Before we turn the page on another year, we’d like to take a moment to look back on some of our proudest moments from 2013.

I get a huge volume of e-mail, but I don’t get the kind of hostile stuff that guys like Joe Weisenthal and Paul Krugman sometimes joke about. I got one today, though, and boy is this guy steaming over my MMT coloring book! Here’s the message:

It’s hard not to sympathize with a guy like this. He apparently has kids, and he’s scared to death that his children and grandchildren will suffer real harm because Washington won’t get its fiscal house in order. And why wouldn‘t he think that? I mean, really. Politicians on both sides of the aisle have spent decades labeling the government’s finances a “fiscal train wreck” that will leave future generations with a “crushing burden of debt.” The mainstream media hypes these fears on a daily basis, and even NPR appears to be shilling for the debt scolds.

So it’s no wonder a guy like this is blasting me. He had probably never before encountered anything that rejects, so forcefully, the entire compilation of debt and deficit tropes.

He doesn’t strike me as a particularly open-minded guy, but I think I’ll send him this list of suggested readings anyhow. Maybe he hasn’t finished his holiday shopping.

Paul Krugman has a new post that explains why the debate over money- vs. bond-financing of government deficits is really much ado about nothing. In it, he essentially echoes longstanding MMT-core principles, as we will show below. Indeed, MMT blogs have written as much many times previously (for example, see here, here, here, and here).

Krugman’s post looks at two alternative scenarios:

Case 1: The government runs a deficit, selling bonds to offset the shortfall, while the Federal Reserve does QE

Case 2: The government runs a deficit but does not sell bonds, instead financing all of its spending by “printing money” (i.e. with newly created base money)

Warren Mosler, writing for US News & World Reports, makes the case that the Fed should not “normalize” rates or go back to trying to fine tune the economy by raising and lowering the overnight interest rate but, instead, just leave rates where they are. Let’s see if Warren’s argument will top the list of reader favorites. Read the full article here.

Randy Wray and Stephanie Kelton presented at Fields Institute at University of Toronto in conjunction with INET. The conference was Mathematics for New Economic Thinking. The presentation links below will take you to Field’s site where slides appear side by side with the video. Below the links to the videos are links to view and download PDF versions of the slides as well.

Randy Wray’s presentation, “The Nature of Money: A Series of Debits and Credits” can be viewed here.

As much as I dislike the title of this article from Advisor Perspectives, the essay itself is a good overview of the talks I’ve been giving at national, regional and chapter meetings of the Financial Planning Association (FPA) over the past year-and-a-half. I wasn’t aware that Veras was working on a piece and didn’t see it until it was published (or I would have implored him to change the title!). I wanted to share the piece but only after this word of caution: I would not and did not say, “deficits don’t matter,” as you’ll discover if you read the entire piece. This is a touchy subject for MMTers, who’ve been (wrongly!) accused of taking the position that “deficits don’t matter.” Randy Wray made the MMT position crystal clear years ago, and I told Dan Jamieson the same thing when he interviewed me for a similar piece in Investment News:

A few weeks ago, I had a lengthy e-mail exchange with Frank N. Newman, former Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. Frank’s books (here and here) are so closely aligned with MMT thinking about deficits, debt, monetary operations, etc. that I wanted to get his thoughts on one of the most common criticisms of MMT. MMT recognizes that the currency itself is a simple public monopoly and that the issuer of the currency must spend (or lend) it into existence, before it can be used to pay taxes or buy bonds. The implication? Governments that issue sovereign money are not revenue constrained. Critics have argued that MMT has this all wrong because the system requires the government to have numbers on its balance sheet before it can spend — i.e. the government is not allowed to run an overdraft and is, therefore, constrained by cash on hand. Here’s what Frank Newman thinks of that critique:

Many economists (perhaps even those who agree with us) refuse to talk about the national debt and government deficits the way we do on this blog. Instead of boldly challenging the assertion that the U.S. faces a long-run debt (or deficit) problem, headline progressives typically do what Jared Bernstein did in his column today — i.e. they pay “obligatory” tribute to the Balanced Budget Gods, thereby reinforcing the case for austerity at some point in the not-so-distant future when we will be forced to to deal with this very bad thing called the government deficit. Followers of my work here and on Twitter know that I refuse to pay homage to the Balanced Budget Gods. Instead, I prefer to shift the burden of proof onto those who contend that the U.S. faces a long-term debt or deficit problem. The first step is to establish that solvency can never be an issue for a government that spends, taxes and borrows in its own (non-convertible) currency. The following quote from the St. Louis Federal Reserve usually does the trick, but this great confession from Alan Greenspan also helps.